Kiss of Life

Tennessee Williams on a romantic reawakening.

On December 30, 1947, the thirty-six-year-old Tennessee Williams boarded a ship bound for France, sailing away from America and from the tumultuous success on Broadway, only a few weeks earlier, of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Almost immediately, he hit creative still water, finding it “frightfully hard to discover a new vein of material.” When, in late 1948, his play “Summer and Smoke” failed on Broadway, Williams’s confidence dipped still further; he felt, he said, like a “discredited old conjurer.” To his champion Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic of the Times, he wrote in June, 1949, “The trouble is that you can’t make any real philosophical progress in a couple of years. The scope of understanding enlarges quite slowly, if it enlarges at all, and the scope of interest seems to wait upon understanding. . . . All artists who work from the inside out, have all the same problem: they cannot make sudden, arbitrary changes of matter and treatment until the inner man is ripe for it.”

During this stalled period, Williams was falling in love with Frank Merlo, a high-spirited twenty-five-year-old Sicilian-American, who was to be his companion and factotum for the next fourteen years. Merlo’s steadfastness stabilized Williams and brought him unexpected happiness. “He was so close to life,” he said. “He tied me down to earth.” Williams’s theatrical testament to this romance is the 1950 comedy “The Rose Tattoo,” which is generally considered the runt of his major plays. The current expert revival now at London’s Royal National (under the robust direction of Nicholas Hytner and the late Steven Pimlott), however, adds new lustre to the text—and reinforces the role that the National has played over the past decade in resuscitating Williams’s international reputation.

Williams dedicated “The Rose Tattoo” to Merlo, whose rambunctiousness and decency, along with his olive skin and sculpted physique, are incarnated here in the clownish Alvaro Mangiacavallo (“My name . . . means ‘Eat-a-horse,’ ” he explains), who brings the inconsolable self-dramatizing seamstress Serafina della Rose back to life. Beneath the hubbub of the play’s setting, in a Sicilian neighborhood of an American Gulf Coast town, Williams finally discovers a new thematic note: the joy of deliverance from creative and emotional impasse.

At the National, even before the play begins, the battle of opposing spiritual forces—life vs. death is a constant motif in Williams—is signalled by two dressmaking dummies that stand behind Serafina’s sewing machine: one wears a white wedding dress, the other black widow’s weeds. They are intended, according to the stage directions, to “face each other in violent attitudes, as though having a shrill argument.” If Mark Thompson’s shrewd stage design doesn’t quite follow Williams’s symbolic directions, it is eloquent in its ability to capture the deeper implications of Serafina’s hysteria. Her bungalow is positioned in front of a scrim of mackerel sky and revolves, like a sort of clapboard Rubik’s Cube, to reveal a gaudy, cluttered interior. When we first see her, Serafina (the superb Zoë Wanamaker) is poised on the sofa, eagerly awaiting the return of her husband, Rosario, a truck driver. Her appearance—she “looks like a plump little Italian opera singer in the role of Madame Butterfly,” Williams says—hints at her comically grandiose and romantic core.

Almost immediately, Williams introduces two messengers of disenchantment: a local healer who tries to sell Serafina a powder to decrease male goatishness, and a light-fingered female customer who steals a framed photograph of Rosario while urgently requiring a shirt made from rose-colored silk for a man who is “wild like a Gypsy.” The audience may twig to Rosario’s misbehavior at this point, but Serafina remains staunchly under her own romantic spell. She idealizes Rosario’s pedigree and his passion; and, in the process, of course, she inflates herself. (She claims that her drug-smuggling husband is of noble lineage; the Baronessa is the community’s tongue-in-cheek nickname for her.) “For love I make characters in plays,” Williams famously wrote; likewise, Serafina constructs a sustaining fiction. From Rosario’s absence, she invents a permanent presence. “The memory of the rose in my heart is perfect!” she says. Such is their union, she claims, that a rose-shaped tattoo similar to the one on Rosario’s chest appeared on her breast—a sort of stigmata—at the moment of conception of their second child, with whom she is pregnant. Serafina hymns Rosario’s hair, his chest, his lovemaking; she counts the exact number of nights—four thousand three hundred and eighty—that they have spent together in their twelve-year marriage. “Each time is the first time with him,” she says. “Time doesn’t pass.”

When Rosario is killed and Serafina, in her grief, loses the baby, her melancholy becomes morbid. She can’t part with Rosario’s body; against the wishes of the Church, she keeps his purified ashes in an urn on the mantelpiece. For the next three years, she locks herself away, alone with her uncontested memories. To keep her vision of the marriage bright, she represses any shadow of doubt. “To me the big bed was beautiful like a religion,” she tells the local priest. “Now I lie on it with dreams, with memories only! But it is still beautiful to me and I don’t believe that the man in my heart gave me horns!” Serafina’s abiding emotion turns out to be a passion for ignorance; she’s “a female ostrich,” one neighbor rightly observes.

Nonetheless, suspicion breaks through in fragments of remembered dialogue. “He was—wild like a—Gypsy,” she says. “ ‘Wild—like a—Gypsy’? Who said that?—I hate to start to remember, and then not remember.” In fact, her performance of grief is an act of disremembering, a defensive strategy of radical innocence. This extends to her teen-age daughter, Rosa (the fetching Susannah Fielding), whom she tries to prevent from taking her final exams and from seeing a young sailor she has fallen for. Rosa, at her graduation, is awarded, in addition to her diploma, “The Digest of Knowledge”; for Williams, sex always marks the beginning of knowledge, and carnality arrives here in the shape of Mangiacavallo (the excellent Darrell D’Silva), another truck driver.

The uncouth Mangiacavallo—another of Williams’s primitives—seeks refuge in Serafina’s house in order to have a cry after losing a fistfight. “I always cry after a fight,” he tells her. “But I don’t want people to see me. It’s not like a man.” He is humiliated, vulnerable, down to earth, honest; he has no pedigree (he is “the grandson of the village idiot,” he says) or property (“Love and affection is what I got to offer”). He is, psychologically speaking, everything that Serafina is not. Inevitably, as Williams’s stage directions instruct, there is a “profound unconscious response” between them. Mangiacavallo’s pragmatism punctures Serafina’s grandiosity. When she learns the name of Rosario’s mistress, a blackjack dealer at a local casino, and sets off to stab her with a kitchen knife, Mangiacavallo literally and figuratively disarms her. He calls the woman and confirms Rosario’s infidelity. Wanamaker, who has a fine, fierce sense of comedy, makes this moment of disillusionment sensational. As in all fairy tales, it is not the enchanted but the disenchanted who are free. Rosario’s ashes are scattered; Serafina’s desire returns. Tears give way to laughter, and time—in the form of a Bulova watch that Serafina buys for her daughter—resumes. Williams’s heroine is no longer out of time but in the moment.

At the finale, the shirtless Mangiacavallo hides on the embankment above the house; in order to coax him back down, Serafina throws the disputed rose-colored silk shirt to the town folk, who rush it up the embankment, “like a streak of flame shooting up a dry hill,” the stage directions read. It’s a gorgeous, beautifully managed image of desire. The shirt, once a totem of humiliation, is transformed into a semaphore of hope. As Serafina, too, heads up the embankment, she is finally in motion, moving forward. Although the scene has its own poetic theatrical integrity, for those who know Williams’s story it also marks a poignant, pivotal moment when life held out a brief reprieve from what he called the “little cave of consciousness.” ♦

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